2. Materials and
Methods
2.1. Montivipera occurrence
points
In the current research, we used the most complete dataset of MRC
distribution across mountainous landscapes of Iran, eastern Turkey, and
southern Armenia (Fig. 1). We collected the presence points (n = 91)
throughout the entire range of the species based on direct field
research, other herpetologists’ field studies, and literature review.
All the presence points were assessed based on the IUCN range map and
spatial outliers (especially those from the literature) were excluded.
Moreover, to cope with the probable spatial autocorrelation of the
occurrence points we removed repeated points within a buffer of 5-km
radius which remained us 82 occurrence points. The coverage of all
collected records indicates apparent signs of spatial bias toward the
north and northwestern Iran, eastern Turkey, and Armenia, and sparse
sampling across the Zagros Mountains in western Iran, where new
localities were just recently recorded. Therefore, the occurrence points
were split into training and testing data, using records from northern
parts for training and keeping the newly identified presence data from
southern parts as independent evaluation data.